Figure 1
“Facétie : Crédit est mort, les mauvais payeurs l'ont tué,” Anonymous, engraving, 1728, À Paris chez Daumont rue de la Feronnerie à l’Aigle d’Or.
Source: Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
- 1 Jeremy Bentham, Defence of Usury, London, T. Payne & Son, 1787.
1In his book Just Debt, philosopher Ilsup Ahn develops the idea that debt is based on logic as much as storytelling. In his introduction, he notes a recent evolution of the principle of debt in this regard which, in its neoliberal version, seems to have cut off one of the two limbs on which the concept stands: “From the perspective of a more holistic ethics of debt, the neoliberal concept of debt is problematic because, by neglecting the story aspect of debt, it has enervated the moral ethos of debt, rendering it as a matter of mere contract and mechanical calculation” (Ahn 2017: 7). Through this reference to storytelling, the author aims to show that there is a neoliberal conception of debt that results from an evolution of the discourse concerning it. Prior to this, debt was considered from the point of view of social credit, and it was therefore fully in line with a set of moral discourses. In the neoliberal logic, debt is reduced to the economic link, which is distinct from social ties and the set of stories—whether personal or collective—constituting society: it becomes an amoral datum. According to Ahn, the turning point in this evolution is a 1787 work by Jeremy Bentham, Defence of Usury,1 which eventually led to usury being authorized in the nineteenth century (ibid.: 131–156), and therefore to an evolution of the form of debt, through the generalization of money lending.
2Ahn’s work recalls the dual nature—storytelling and accounting—of debt. In addition, the author emphasizes that there are two pitfalls when discussing this subject: on the one hand, reducing debt to a simple logic of amoral and abstract exchange (the debt of accounting tables), and, on the other hand, hyperbolizing debt, which consists in seeing logics of exchange as well as reciprocity in all human relations, thus making the economic link the explanatory model for all social ties. The study by Coquery, Weber, and Menant (2006) that focuses on practical rationalities, which can be defined as a set of ways of writing, quantifying, and counting economic operations in order to improve their efficiency, seems at times to limit the scope of analysis to the economic logic and to book-keeping. However, it paves the way for other analyses of practical rationalities, for example concerning the world of entertainment, which offers a privileged vantage point to grasp the two overlapping aspects of debt.
3During the period extending from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, debt was widespread in French society in general and in Parisian society in particular. It was the subject of a dual movement of expansion—in volume—and centralization around credit institutions (Hoffman, Postel-Vinay & Rosenthal 2000). Over the same period, theatrical production also had a dual existence. On the one hand, it was an activity of production of symbolic goods marked by logics of representation and ephemeral co-presence. The spectacle event (Spielmann 2013) offered a representation performed for a given audience. On the other hand, it was mainly an economic activity, the forms of whose existence may have evolved at times (with the creation of monopolies, or on the contrary with their dissolution), but whose principle remained the same: an audience paid to see a play, and that money allowed paying the wages of all the theatre staff. In other words, the spectacle event produced account books as much as symbolic representations. Thus, debt also had a dual existence, both as the possible or real situation faced by a company, a playhouse, or indebted individuals, but also as a dramatic situation, in theatre texts, performed by these companies and individuals.
4This article aims to study the way in which theatre addressed the dual nature of debt, in a period of changing relationships to debt and money lending. This comparison of the evolution of economic theories and practices on the one hand and of the forms of drama on the other is in line with Christian Biet’s work (2002) on fin-de-règne comedies, that is, comedies of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theatre was a particularly important medium (Yon 2017), which fully participated in the constitution of the public space (Poirson 2009). In this space, it was not so much the great singular works of the dramatic canon that formed the fundamental relationship between theatre and society, but rather the smaller plays, and especially their accumulation, their recurrences, and their constants. A study of recurrences is necessary here to try to understand the social narrative that was attached to the practical rationalities linked to borrowing, lending, and debt. To do so, the corpus is composed of plays whose titles would have generated expectations among the audience linked to the imaginary construct of debt: the borrower, the usurer, and arrest (that is to say, imprisonment for debt) were all terms which announced stories about debt.
5The dual nature of debt is linked to the dual nature of the institutions linked to it. Theatre is a striking example of this, as its activity is based to such an extent on dramatized narration on the one hand and on an economic activity intrinsic to its representation on the other (the need for costumes, even minimal, possibly sets, or even professional actors, etc.). However, this economic nature has differed depending on the era.
6From the seventeenth century onwards, the development of theatrical writing and representations depicting situations of debt corresponded to a long mutation in the entertainment world, one that Romain Jobez (2021) calls the “constitution of the [modern] theatrical field.” It was marked by the growing professionalization of acting, but also by the progressive institutionalization of theatres, that is to say their incorporation into the state system, through the constitution of a related literary field (Viala 1985), but also through the creation of specific institutions (the most famous of which, in France, is the Comédie-Française, created by a royal decree dated 21 October 1680). The theatrical field was not dissociated from economic activities; on the contrary, it was intimately linked to them. In this context, “practical rationalities” were increasingly adopted, including those that consisted in recording the flow of money—as evidenced by the La Grange register of the Comédie-Française, which has been the subject of significant digitization work in recent years through the “Registres de la Comédie-Française” research project.2 However, this register was only an epiphenomenon when it came to the more general logic to which theatres were subject: that of keeping proper accounts. Accounting appeared all the more important since theatres (the Comédie-Française and the Opera initially) were often subject to the control of the Maison du Roi, that is to say, of the nascent state (Bourdieu 2004 [1997]). Sometimes, theatres were more simply under the control of their performance director or their company director, who abandoned domestic, family-style management during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to instead adopt an entrepreneurial logic (Poirson 2011). This new logic accompanied their entry into a progressively capitalist and liberal world in the early nineteenth century (Loncle 2018).
- 3 Created in 1790, the juge de paix were judges in charge of small claims, including debts.
7In the theatrical field, cases of debt were numerous. This debt could be that of company directors who failed to assert themselves in a highly competitive field involving constant pressure (Clay 2013: 128–131). The most famous, in this regard, was perhaps young Molière, who was in debt and imprisoned at his creditors’ request—first the master candlestick maker and then the linen keeper (Forestier 2018: 63–70). Debt also affected actors and actress, particularly throughout the eighteenth century. While this was a period when credit was a widespread practice, for example to buy bread from production to consumption (Kaplan 1996: 137-152), the debt of theatre people ended up becoming a subject of public policy. Thus, on 18 August 1779, a “Royal declaration establishing regulations for shows that follow the court, the salaries of actors, and the security of their creditors” was published, noting the need to provide “Actors & People attached to Shows” with the means to carry out their jobs in spite of their debt situations, so that, according to Article 5, only a third of the wages could be seized (by theatre directors). An edict dated 28 February 1782 specified the terms by which performance directors were to handle the assets seized. Theatre directors could also be at fault when it came to debt when they did not pay actors their wages regularly, or did not pay the various suppliers (carpenters, tinsmiths, etc.) with whom they did business. For example, during the French Revolution, theatrical activity increased considerably in Paris following the government decree dated 13 January 1791. As the theatrical space became more highly competitive, late payments to employees and suppliers became more frequent, giving rise to abundant legal activity, particularly on the part of juges de paix3, who regularly had to deal with cases opposing theatre directors and their creditors (Cot 2021: 359–404; Rochefort 2021: 174–177). Far from developing outside this most intimate of practical rationalities—calculating the debt that one can afford to contract or grant—the theatrical field never ceased to produce credit situations, whether internal to the field itself (in the case of unpaid wages, for example) or external to it (unpaid purchases or loans taken out personally).
8If the progressive institutionalization of theatre and its inclusion in the economic sphere went hand in hand in the modern era, then it can be hypothesized that the representation of debt was the expression of this dual field, the state and the economy, and that it perpetuated its fundamental logic. The fact that playwrights and theatre companies were not systematically in debt appears secondary in this regard. Indeed, for its representation, theatre required two distinct yet complementary processes: representation (through writing and then what has been called, since the nineteenth century, staging [Martin 2014]) and the authorization of this representation. This authorization may have been lacking a posteriori (through repressive censorship, as in the case of Molière’s Tartuffe [Biet 2013], or through the commercial failure of a play), but it may also have been lacking a priori (through preventive censorship, which developed mainly during the eighteenth century, but also through forms of self-censorship, conformity to morals, attempts to foresee the public’s expectations, etc.). Thus, theatrical production could not be dissociated from social life, and this for two reasons: on the one hand, because its authors and actors were part of it; on the other hand, because it was subject to more social control than a strictly literary practice—which could remain strictly intimate. As Rémi Lenoir (2012: 134) put it when referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s course (2012) at the Collège de France on this subject, the state “produces and inculcates cognitive structures.” The same could be said of the market when it produces strong representations (through advertising, for example). Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, theatre happened to be at the intersection of the two. In this sense, with regard to social life, dramatic productions can be described through a double metaphor, whose terms may seem a priori incompatible yet reflect the mode of being of this production: theatre is, no doubt, the mirror of the world, but it is also the cement of society.
9To the dual nature of theatre—symbolic production and economic agent—is therefore added a dual nature of representation, which produces and reproduces the social form. Consequently, the study of the theatre of debt, that is to say of the inscription of the latter in dramatic structures, is inseparable from a study of the state of debt and its extra-theatrical social representation. However, while the practice of debt was both common and old, it was more often based on debt to suppliers than on debt due to money lending. The latter had long been the subject of religious condemnation. Nevertheless, this condemnation underwent changes in the eighteenth century and then at the beginning of the nineteenth century, thus bringing these situations of debt closer together.
10The long-standing religious condemnation of usury transformed into a legal condemnation that persisted throughout the eighteenth century, particularly following the failure of Law’s System in 1720 and the various writings that supported the System and conceptually reorganized the principle of credit by trying to separate financial credit from social credit (Orain 2018: 161–171). The modern period was characterized by debates about debt and its necessity, but also its forms. Thus, while earlier periods made a distinction between commercial debt, that is a merchant selling on credit, and usury debt, that is selling money, this distinction and the condemnation of usury grew weaker in the eighteenth century. In a chapter of The Spirit of the Laws devoted to lending at interest in Book XXII (“Of Laws in Relation to the Use of Money”), Montesquieu defended money lending and, in the name of the fight against usury, opposed being too severe against it:
Silver is the sign of values. It is clear that he who needs this sign should rent it, as he does everything he needs. The whole difference is that other things can either be rented bought, whereas silver, which is the price of things, is rented and not bought.
To lend one’s silver without interest is a very good act, but one senses that this can be only a religious counsel and not a civil law.
In order for commerce to proceed well, silver must have a price, but this price must be small. If it is too high, the trader, who sees that it would cost him more in interest than he could gain in his commerce, undertakes nothing; if silver has no price, no one lends it, and the trader still undertakes nothing.
I am mistaken when I say that no one lends it. The business of society must always go forward; usury is established, bringing with it the disorder that has been experienced at all times.
The law of Mohammed confuses usury with the loan at interest. Usury increases in Mohammedan countries in proportion to the severity of the prohibition; the lender indemnifies himself for his peril in infringing the law. (Montesquieu 1989 [1748]: 420)
11While Montesquieu maintained the traditional opposition between goods and money, which was only the “sign of value,” he nevertheless resolved it when it came to loans and debts: necessity subsumed goods and signs, except for the fact that money was hired and could not be bought. The distinction, which was important a priori (since it implicitly allowed continuing to distinguish commercial debt from usury debt) had a fundamental consequence: the defence of money lending. In the name of the inevitability of the latter (“the affairs of society will ever make it necessary”), Montesquieu defended its legality by explaining that the prohibition of loans produced usury itself: economic reasoning (the increase in risk for the lender leads to an increase in the cost of the loan) prevailed over religious reasoning.
- 4 Pierre Rulié and Jean-Louis Gouttes, Théorie de l’intérêt de l’argent, tirée des principes du droit (...)
12Far from being singular, this defence of money lending and the shift of arguments against it from religious discourse to the field of political economy were recurrent throughout the century (Legay 2014), despite the reaffirmation of the prohibition of usury by Benedict XIV in the 1745 encyclical Vix pervenit. Thus, in 1780, two clergymen, Jean-Louis Gouttes and Pierre Rulié, published Théorie de l’intérêt de l’argent tirée des principes du droit naturel, de la théologie et de la politique contre l’abus d’imputation d’usure (Theory of interest on money derived from the principles of natural law, theology, and politics against the abuse of usury imputation).4 On the topic of usury, they wrote:
If, as we have said, it consists in an injustice done to the borrower, the source of this disorder will only dry up when we no longer see unjust men who are greedy for the property of others. Thus, there is a clear usury against the law of charity, in the interests that the rich demand from the poor. There is usury in all cases in which surprise and fraud provide the lender with unjust profits.
- 5 I wish to thank Marianne Arnold, from the Département Philosophie, histoire, sciences de l’homme at (...)
13This text marked the transition of the forms taken by the condemnation of usury all the more so as it was the work of two members of the clergy, possibly helped by Turgot (Barbier, Barbier & Billard 1879: 7025), who had already written Mémoire sur les prêts d’argent in 1770, which was included in the work by Gouttes and Rulié. The defence of interest-bearing loans and the distinction with usury remained a discursive practice in the nineteenth century. Thus, half a century later, in his 1826 Traité de l’usure, François Xavier Paul Garnier wrote that the courts should not see usury everywhere, and added:
- 6 François Xavier Paul Garnier, Traité de l’usure dans les transactions civiles et commerciales, Pari (...)
It is especially on this matter that morality and the law should not be confused; morality, which is much more severe, condemns an infinite number of actions that civil law does not prohibit.6
14However, in the meantime, practices had changed, notably with the 1807 usury law which normalized money lending (Jolivet-Roche 2015: 38). Thus, Bentham’s treatise mentioned by Ilsup Ahn in the introduction to his work was part of a broader movement: the rehabilitation of money lending and changing condemnations of usury (Gelpi & Julien-Labruyère 1994).
15The questions that arise in the study of the theatre of debt is therefore to determine whether it followed these social changes and changing condemnations or not, and to understand how the stage addressed the stakes associated with money, both in their ruptures and continuities.
- 7 Marc-Antoine Legrand, L’Usurier gentilhomme, Paris, P. Ribou, 1713.
- 8 Pontaud, L’Usurier dupé, Paris, Cailleau, 1786.
16At a time of changing relationships to money lending and usury, the question that thus arises is that of the positioning of the theatrical art world on this subject. During the pivotal period that was the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the dramatic genre of usury was comedy, and it was closely linked to trickery. These plays hence seem to have been mutations of the fin-de-règne works that described a new world, that of unscrupulous financiers and of the permanent search for personal interest (Biet 2002). Two plays highlight such change and permanence in drama: L’Usurier gentilhomme, by Marc-Antoine Legrand, first produced by the actors of the Comédie-Française on 11 September 1713,7 and L’Usurier dupé, a one-act comedy written by an author named Pontaud, first produced at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris on 20 September 1785.8 Their titles and plots are similar: a usurer’s failed attempt at arranging a marriage.
- 9 Translator’s note: in French, “manant” means “churl.”
17L’Usurier gentilhomme takes up the codes of classical drama—the very title of the play is a reference to Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme—and transposes them to the world of usury. The title character is a usurer with peasant origins, whose telling name is Mananville;9 he is organizing the wedding of his son to Henriette, the daughter of a gentleman creditor. According to the pattern of classical comedy, Henriette is in love with another, Licaste. In the second scene of the first act, the latter’s manservant, Crispin, describes the title character’s biography as follows:
- 10 Marc-Antoine Legrand, L’Usurier gentilhomme, op. cit., p. 11.
Crispin: Back in Paris, after having served several usurers, he started working for himself, and having earned more than two hundred thousand écus in three years, he recently bought some land, and took it upon himself to erect that of the Gruaudiere into a Barony, whose name his son Claude bears.10
18He thus reveals to the audience that the planned matrimony is a misalliance. Taking advantage of the arrival of Mananville’s brother, a peasant whose dialect and manners betray his social origins, Crispin manages to manoeuvre so that Mananville and Henriette’s father renounce the betrothal so that she may marry Licaste. Writing about Molière’s Georges Dandin (1668), Roger Chartier (1994) claims that it is a play that raises the question of how social identity is defined. The question arises in much the same way in Legrand’s play: usury as such is less central to the plot than Mananville’s nouveau riche status and his attempt at an alliance with the aristocracy. The failure of his project comes only from the chance arrival of his brother, who does not try to hide his social origins, thus revealing the coming misalliance. In this play, the role of Crispin, the manservant, is reduced to that of an adjunct to fate.
19L’Usurier dupé, a one-act comedy, was first performed on 20 September 1785. Despite the similarities in title, plot, and even some character names (there is a Crispin in the play), the plot of L’Usurier dupé deviates slightly from that of L’Usurier gentilhomme, although it retains the general characteristics of a classic comedy. The stakes are defined in the second scene by the maid, Lisette:
- 11 Pontaud, L’Usurier dupé, op. cit., p. 9.
Lisette: That it is not easy to know how to deceive a usurer,
Who has always made a profession of deceiving others.11
20Oronte, a usurer, wants his daughter, Angélique, to marry Rodrigue, the son of an old friend of his. However, Angélique wants to marry Valère. To deceive Oronte, the manservant, Crispin, makes him believe that the real Rodrigue is Crispin himself, who is playing a trick on him, and that Valère is the real Rodrigue, so that when the marriage takes place, Angélique will actually marry Valère. The play takes up the figure of the greedy and calculating (in every sense of the word) old man to complement the figure of the usurer, to which is added a common anti-Semitic connotation through an exclamation uttered by Crispin, in the fourteenth scene, about Oronte: “What a Jew!” In doing so, the play participates in the mythology associating Judaism and usury, which has been studied by Francesca Trivellato (2019). There are several fundamental dramaturgical differences in the plot with Legrand’s play. In the latter, the usurer father aligns various interests: his own, those of his son, and those of his family. Far from being a father who misuses his paternal power, his only fault is attempting a misalliance. On the contrary, Pontaud’s fooled usurer appears as a bad father, in that he seeks his own personal interest rather than that of his daughter. In the first play, the search for interest threatens to weaken the social order, while in the second it weakens the family order. Furthermore, the function of usury differs between the two plays. In Legrand’s, usury serves to justify Mananville’s wealth and to make the misalliance all the more reprehensible since his fortune comes from an activity that is the subject of social condemnation. In L’Usurier dupé, usury is associated with deception. Its purpose is less to determine a social position than a moral disposition and an ability to deceive. From this perspective, and this is the fourth major difference, the calculating usurer can only be defeated by the calculations of those who are in service: the manservant and the maid.
21The analysis of two plays that are apparently so similar reveals that the character of the usurer is in reality the subject of a dramaturgical treatment only to the extent that his characteristics allow the question of the misalliance or the failure of paternal authority to be addressed. The usurer exists as a figure that is independent of the debts that he is owed. Thus, even in the case of L’Usurier gentilhomme, in which Mananville is a nobleman’s creditor, this status does not provide him with any particular ascendancy. These plays thus stage a condemnable usurer as a character, independently of any debt relationship.
22An early-nineteenth-century play features the figure of the usurer, focusing on the debt relationship that he maintains with his debtor. Arlequin en gage, a vaudeville play written by Alphonse de Martainville, was first produced at the Théâtre des Jeunes Élèves in 1802. From the first scene, the usurer is represented as a foil for the borrower, Arlequin, who is a poet. In a song typical of vaudeville, Arlequin deplores the poverty linked to his profession as an artist, while Gille rejoices that his activity as a pawnbroker has made him wealthy. Song is then supplemented by speech:
Arlequin: My neighbour Gille is rolling in money—
Gille: My neighbour Arlequin is dying of hunger.
Arlequin: He’s a usurer.
Gille: He’s an artist.
Arlequin: What a cruel thing poverty is—
Gille: What a beautiful thing money is!
Arlequin: It destroys genius—
Gille: It swells your soul!
Arlequin: It kills talent.
Gille: It makes stupidity shine.
Arlequin: I once lived comfortably!
Gille: I used to be penniless—
Arlequin: My works testified to my free-flowing genius.
Gille: Let me put my accounts in order.
- 12 Alphonse de Martainville, Arlequin en gage, Paris, Barba, 1802, p. 4.
Arlequin: Today, my brush is without heat, my ideas without energy, and my imagination is as empty as my purse.12
23The opposition between the artist and the usurer brings new dialectics into play, in which the artist can no longer really produce anything because he lives in poverty, while the usurer cannot be an artist because he seeks opulence. The artist then finds himself serving art to the detriment of his life, while the usurer serves his life to the detriment of art. In this fable, as in the reality of the theatrical world of 1802, the artist needs to get into debt. He offers a tragedy as security for this loan, which leads to the following response:
Gille: Who would ever come and collect such a belonging?
The poet [Arlequin]: Posterity.
Gille: But posterity could only collect it from my descendants, and I work for myself.13
24On the one hand, the play presents the usurer at work calculating the future, evaluating the risks of a security that will only have value in the future; on the other, the artist at work for posterity, that is to say for interests that will never come.
- 14 Voltaire, La Femme qui a raison, Geneva, Lambert, 1759.
25These opposing logics make up the beginning of a plot that soon involves marriage once more. Gille wants to marry the daughter of a debtor, Monsieur Cassandre, who expects money from his brother, which does not come. His daughter is in love with Arlequin—and Monsieur Cassandre prefers him to Gille. To save Monsieur Cassandre, the poet gets into debt with Gille, pawning himself, and finds himself locked up in a cupboard. At the end of the play, Monsieur Cassandre’s brother arrives with the money. The usurer is repaid but he finds himself alone, while Arlequin can get married. Not only is the theme of marriage recurrent, but it comes back in a precise form: the usurer is the one who does not get married. This was already the case in L’Usurier gentilhomme, but also later in a play by Voltaire on the same theme, La Femme qui a raison, produced for the first time at the Théâtre de Carouge in 1758.14 In all these plays, even when the usurer has children to marry off, he is without a wife. Debt is, so to speak, his only real social tie, the only one that unites him to those of his own generation, and it is a dissoluble tie, and even one that is meant to be dissolved. A repaid usurer is a desocialized usurer.
26In this respect, Martinville’s play offers a new variation on the theme of the fooled usurer. Guilty of wanting to integrate himself into the social system by financial force, the usurer is irremediably excluded by trickery, a quality attributed to him and yet lacking to achieve his ends. However, in Arlequin en gage, the usurer does indeed exist as a lender, that is to say as someone who has created a tie with his debtor, one that is double as well since he is also the owner of Arlequin’s apartment. The tie between the characters is signified from the beginning of the play by the mirroring of the two situations. Beyond the representation of the two characters, the writing of the songs and the lines ties their words together, as if this were due to their tie through debt prior to the plot.
27The character of the borrower appears as the counterpart of that of the usurer. Indeed, while the latter is the subject of clear moral condemnation on stage, the former is not spared either. In the drama of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the borrower is shown at times as a character who plays on the credulity of others for his own interest.
- 15 Translator’s note: in French, “emprunteur” means “borrower.”
- 16 Claude François Rivarol, L’Emprunteur, Paris, Chez les libraires qui vendent des nouveautés [sic], (...)
28Thus, in 1785, in a one-act comedy with an explicit title,15 L’Emprunteur,16 by “M. Saint-Martin” (Claude François Rivarol), a poet named Graphon is constantly borrowing money from those around him in exchange for verse that he writes. He officiates with two friends, Tristan and Olivier, who praise his merits everywhere they go. Graphon borrows money from Mimi, the daughter—a minor—of Monsieur de Lampourdier, his landlord, to whom he reads out his poetic production. In the ninth scene of the play, the recitation has an immediate effect on Madame de Lampourdier:
Graphon: Verse on the metempsychosis of bodies. / He coughs and spits. / Man and animals are reborn to suffer; / Man and animals are reborn to die; / The reproduction of death is followed, / And death in turn brings forth life: / The tomb beckons to us… &c.
Madame de Lampourdier (has a seizure): Oh? I’m dying.17
29This scene serves to underline the fact that Graphon borrows money because he is a bad poet. From the point of view of the plot, Madame de Lampourdier’s fainting spell reveals Mimi’s loan to Graphon, which her mother mentions in the twelfth scene:
Madame de Lampourdier: I should say I am indeed [certain]! Mimi in tears / As she saw me suffer, she naively said: / This poet must have a very wicked heart, / To make you have the vapours; / I thought that my money would make him more honest. / What do you mean your money? Yes, dear mother; / This Mr. Graphon, while chatting earlier / Asked me for my purse, and told me to tell you, / That I had lost it, and that it was for laughs / Well! What do you think of that, President! / Is that how one jokes with a young child?18
30Graphon is then unmasked as an unscrupulous borrower and sent away from the lodgings with his friends, to whom he nevertheless promises a dinner with the money from Mimi’s purse. In this play, the borrower becomes the morally reprehensible figure, both specifically because he is a bad writer (and the name of the character—Graphon—is laden with meaning here), but also because he ignores the rules of borrowing, since he takes money from a minor.
- 19 Anonymous, L’Emprunteur, Paris, Barra, 1818.
31Thirty years later, a play with the same title, by an anonymous author, was performed on 15 October 1817 and published in 1818.19 This time, the borrower is called Méricourt. He borrows in particular from Sainval, Madame Solange’s suitor. Méricourt goes so far as to borrow Sainval’s love interest, since he also announces that he wants to marry Madame Solange, whom he courts under the name of Senneterre. He borrows love lines from Sainval and reads them to Madame Solange. By a ruse, Sainval unmasks Méricourt and obtains Madame Solange’s betrothal. In both cases, the borrower plays the role that the usurer played in previous comedies: that of a man who undermines the social system by attacking the family, here either through impoverishment due to the loan or through seduction under a false name. Beyond an onstage condemnation (through the borrower’s final defeat), the structures of both plays seem to revolve around the Ancien Régime practice of concentric debt, according to which one first got into debt with relatives, then with labour suppliers (lord/church/village elite), neighbours, regional elites, and as a last resort, with strangers (Fontaine 2012: 104). In both plays, the condemned borrower appeals to both extremes, by making strangers kin, but by continuing to treat them (through trickery) as strangers. However, the symbolic punishment for the borrower falls short of the real constraints that debtors underwent in modern life, constraints that the theatre also addresses.
- 20 Claude-Joseph de Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique, contenant l’explication des termes (...)
32A major question arises in the theatre of debt, from the nineteenth century onwards: that of prison. The prison institution had long been a financial institution, since the seizure (arrest) and then imprisonment for debt had been a common practice since the end of the Middle Ages (Claustre 2007). It did not constitute a punishment, according to the law dictionary by jurist and law professor Claude-Joseph de Ferrière: “Imprisonment is the capture of a person to take them to prison, by virtue of a commission from the Judge, either for a crime or for debt, in cases when debtors can be imprisoned.”20 Creditors thus had the right to have their debtors locked up in prison to force them to repay debts, a right that was not always exercised and remained a threat. Imprisonment for debt was multifaceted: it went beyond the simple incarceration of a body and was at the heart of many issues studied by Simon Castanié in his PhD (2023). This practice was the subject of criticism, the first of which was levelled by Beccaria in chapter XXXIV of his work Des Délits et des Peines (1764), for whom it was necessary to distinguish fraudulent bankruptcy, which was reprehensible, from innocent bankruptcy. Theatre people were not immune to imprisonment, even if their sentences were shorter than those of other professions (ibid.: 296).
33The theme of prison emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century and immediately appeared as a continuation of the criticism of imprisonment for debt through theatre. In plays resorting either to prison or its threat, the figure of the indebted individual always seems positive: he is a likeable young man, whose debt is only the corollary of a certain taste for life, which may be casual yet good-natured. The bad borrower is a character who lives for pleasure, borrows, and hopes to get by, while the good borrower shares the same traits, with the difference that he actually does get by. An example can be found in Nicolas Julien Forgeot’s Les Dettes, a comedy in two acts performed in Paris in 1787 by the actors of the Comédie-Italienne The main character, a knight, expects money from an uncle. The money does not come, and in the second scene, his manservant Dubois describes the situation thus, declaring about the knight’s troubles:
- 21 Nicolas Julien Forgeot, Les Dettes, Paris, Brunet, 1787, p. 4.
It is true that they are great. In the three months that you have been in Paris, you have been running from pleasure to pleasure; you have been surrounded by friends who have been ruining you in the most beautiful way in the world: some earn you money, others borrow it from you, and everything would be going wonderfully, without your creditors who have no manners and have been pursuing you dishonestly.21
34The uncle wants the knight to leave Paris and join him. The knight refuses this situation and therefore decides, a contrario, to have his uncle join him, by pretending to be seriously ill. In addition, the uncle wants the knight to marry a rich widow, whereas the latter is in love with Lucinde. In the fourteenth scene, the knight is arrested for his debts. In the fifteenth, the uncle arrives and makes the knight understand that he will save him on the condition that he should marry the rich widow, who is none other than Lucinde. The play ends on a final song, which links the plot to the playwright himself:
But for the price of a few witty little lines / Gentlemen, do not forget, / That while the playwright has made these Debts, / A helping hand can pay them.22
35Another example of this dramaturgy comes later in La Prise de corps ou La fortune inattendue, a play by Léopold Chandezon performed in 1821, more than eighty times (Berthier 2014: 457), notably on the stage of the ephemeral Panorama dramatique theatre, closed in 1823 due to bankruptcy (Lecomte 1900). In this play as in the previous one, the borrower’s (Léon) manservant (Valentin) complains about such a situation of debt:
- 23 Léopold Chandezon, La Prise de corps ou la fortune inattendue, Paris, Pollet, 1821, p. 3.
Ah! I would much rather fight all day than have to torture my inventive genius every day to turn away troublesome creditors or avoid arrests, right, left and centre […]23
36The creditor, Ratinard Ledoux, has a sister who is in love with Léon. The former tries to have the latter put in prison, and through Valentin’s trickery, gets arrested instead. At the very moment when Léon is about to be arrested, a femina ex machina intervenes, in the guise of Pauliska, a Polish aristocrat whose family was saved by him during the Russian campaign. She pays off his debts and promises to marry him, in repayment of the debt of honour:
Pauliska: Say [that I am] grateful; I am paying off my entire family’s debt: you have saved my life and my honour, which is a thousand times more precious still; remain its constant defender, by accepting my fortune and my hand.24
37In both cases, the promise of marriage saves the borrower, who owes his fortune—literally and figuratively—to his personal qualities, which erase his debt via the integration into the social norm through matrimony.
38In both plays, prison appears more as a threat than as a theatrical reality. In 1822, a year after La Prise de corps was performed, another play on the subject was produced at the Gymnase dramatique: Une heure à Ste-Pélagie, ou la prison pour dettes, a one-act comedy written by Michel-Nicolas Balisson. The specificity of this play is that its setting is the Parisian Sainte-Pélagie prison, and more specifically, the cell of an indebted man, Adolphe. The play describes Sainte-Pélagie as a small society, with musicians and writers, which Raymond, Adolphe’s new cellmate, an indebted painter, points out:
- 25 Michel Nicolas Balisson, Une heure à Ste-Pélagie, ou la prison pour dettes, Paris, Quoy, 1822, p. 1 (...)
Raymond: Are you not set on doing your five years? … You are wrong … the accommodation is pleasant, the society select … there is a charming gathering here! … very rich, very distinguished men, artists, bankers, lawyers, colonels, architects, doctors … High-flying young people … the composition of many salons in Paris is not as good as that of our prison.25
39All that Adolphe is missing is the presence of Madame Bellecourt, whom he is in love with, and who is incidentally Raymond’s cousin. A friend of his rich uncle visits him. Indebted to his uncle, the friend gives money to Adolphe, who loses it gambling—the practice that got him into debt, and which he continues in prison. In an expected twist, Madame Bellecourt falls in love with Adolphe and decides to pay his debts at the Clerk’s Office, thus freeing him so that they can get married. Once again, the patrimony brought by the female character, or rather her matrimony, saves the indebted man, despite his obvious flaws and a single clear quality: a form of likeable affability. As in Forgeot’s play, the possible moral condemnation of the borrower is neutralized by the announcement of an upcoming wedding, that is, by his reintegration into the social fabric of the nineteenth century.
40What did these representations of debt show, in an era when money lending was progressively becoming accepted? What did the theatre say about its own relationship to social life? In these plays, it is clear that social reality was less straightforward than its dramatic representation. Those who did not repay their debts were not systematically sent to prison, lenders were not all usurers, usurers were not all unmarried, and prison did not always lead to marriage. These discrepancies and ruptures certainly had an endogenous explanation in the demands of the representation itself: there had to be a spectacle, and to paraphrase an expression used by Christian Biet (quoted in Poirson 2021), theatre cannot tell stories of trains that run on time. However, the important thing here is not that rupture existed, but the forms that it took: the dramatic invariants of debt. If debt existed as an accounting logic and as a story, then the dissociation of the story about debt from the accounting logic through elements that were not part of the latter (marriage) was imposed as a social necessity that continued to make debt exist and to constitute it as a central practice in the economic system that emerged in the modern era.
41Ilsup Ahn’s work is marked by the subprime crisis that occurred in 2007-2008 and its consequences on Western states, in other words by a crisis of private debt that gave rise to a second crisis, that of sovereign debt. This historic moment gave rise to various analyses on the question of debt and its mode of existence in liberal economies. Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek (2014: 43–44), who also wrote in the wake of the private and public debt crisis, explains the social necessity of making debt exist through its temporal conditions:
A particular set of temporalities are associated with the indebtedness: to be able to repay (to remember one’s promise), one has to make one’s behavior predictable, regular and calculating. This not only militates against any future revolt, with its inevitable disruption of the capacity to repay; it also implies an erasure of the memory of past rebellions and acts of collective resistance which disrupted the normal flow of time and led to unpredictable behaviors.
42This obscuring of past revolts and acts of resistance is all the more striking in the case of the representation of debt in theatre, as they underwent mutations between the pre-Revolution and post-Revolution periods, mutations that never take the revolution into account. Indeed, early-nineteenth-century drama seems to depict a world where it was as if the possibility of a new revolution were non-existent, just as the idea that one might never pay one’s debts seemed inconceivable.
43Ilsup Ahn sees in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a founding moment for a separation between two ways of thinking about debt: one that took into account the social narrative in which it was inscribed—and therefore the social ties that it constituted—and one that did not take it into account and was solely a matter of accounting logic. However, it must be noted that while such a separation may have existed, it did not occur in the absence of a supporting narrative. Practical rationalities, even when reduced to double-entry tables allowing for accurate book-keeping, have no existence outside of a society that produces narratives. At the heart of theatrical narratives of debt lies the indebted subject. If he is single, he is lost. On the contrary, if he finds himself, if not married, at least on the verge of being so, he is saved. Debt requires social promises that are kept and a network of sociability so that someone may pay at last, even though the state that presided over theatrical performances so rarely paid (Lutfalla 2019). A contrario, the lender does not need this social system, and it would be unfortunate for him to want to integrate it: when the usurer tries to insert himself into the matrimonial system, he ends up being the butt of the joke. It is therefore at the level of the theatre characters themselves that the rupture between the family and finance, between the social and the economic lies. The theatre of debt participated in the rupture that Ilsup Ahn mentions between the narrative aspect of debt, that is to say its moral ethos, and its accounting dimension. These plays constantly produced collective representations in which the debt had to be repaid, and in which social ties existed through and for the repayment of debts. They thus brought to life the logics at work in practical rationalities by providing a dramatic and social basis, that is to say a recurrent repayment narrative.
